In 2013 I sat in the Paradiso Spiegeltent during the Adelaide Fringe and cried as Maude Davey read a letter written to the thing she dreams of. It made me cry because it was deeply personal, revealing, and honest. It was written as if to a dear friend, the kind you can trust with your failures and insecurities, the kind who will keep your words safe, treasure them, and offer her own in return. I, along with five hundred others, was being entrusted with these words and it was a privilege.
Between Us is a compilation of other letters written to dreams, and journeys, older selves and other-halves, but all have been composed for performance. And this, for me, is the most disappointing aspect of the book. It is meant to be a celebration of the lost art of letter writing, but all the pieces are contrived, not letters, as you or I know them; they are not written from one person to another, from a you to a me; they are not that gift that arrives in the post to be eagerly consumed in silence and alone, with a cup of tea and a shortbread biscuit.
Michael Williams seems to be with me on this one when he says in his ‘letter’ to his other-half, wife Michelle Bennett, “it’s not that I don’t have anything to say, it’s just that it feels odd to be writing to you…” I wonder if, like me, he feels the form is being stretched into an odd shape.
At their best these letters read like diary entries, never to be read by anyone else, full of private angst, thoughtfully examined; they are brave and generous and worth reading for the life lessons they share. At their worst they are attempts at comedic fiction, though I didn’t laugh very much, and the lack of sincerity seemed an insult in places. This was most striking between the first and second letters. Stella Young, comedian and disability activist, opens the book with a letter to her 80 year old self. ‘By the time I get to you…’she says. But she won’t, she died soon after this book was published, and so I read each aspiration for a long and meaningful life with such sadness. The next piece (I can’t bring myself to call it a letter) was a shock. It was a superficial futuristic fantasy that seemed to mock the authenticity of Stella Young’s contribution. Poor placement maybe, but these two letters demonstrate the strength and the weakness of the collection.
When it is strong, however, it is moving and interesting and even entertaining. As well as Stella Young and Michael Williams, writers worth skipping to include Poh Ling Yeow, Zoe Norton Lodge, Adrienne Truscott, Jess Cornelius, Hannah Kent and Alex Craig. Each has taken the brief seriously and written something, letterly, if that’s a word, something intimate and honest and revealing. I feel closer to these writers, and that’s what good letters do – they bring people closer when the distance between them is vast.
So would I recommend it? Well, yes. While it is not a true tribute to the lost art of letter writing, that precious form of communication which, between Jean-Paul Satre and Simone de Beauvoir fostered love, and between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace fostered the theory of evolution. This book does celebrate a form of writing that has evolved, if you like, from the penned letters of our past.
At a time when communication is instant and truncated, when life events are given thumbs up or down in Facebook, and meaning is confined to 140 characters, many of these letters, though contrived, are still precious rare things communicating the hopes and disappointments, the joys and sorrows of their writers.
To quote Michael Williams again, “Maybe that’s what letters are for: to elevate the truly important away from the mundane. To use the illusion of distance, the theatre of words on a page, to make something special out of the everyday…”
If your letter box reveals nothing but bills, Between Us will go beautifully with a cup of tea and a shortbread biscuit.